Monday, July 23, 2018

Over Saxed Sunday 22nd July - Dinant

Our walk to Bouvignes yesterday traced an indirect but particularly pretty route lovingly marked on our map with a somewhat wobbly line by the nice young lady in the tourist office. Exactly as she promised, it was picture postcard pretty, with the feeling of age and proportion in its laneways that can only come from hanging around for a thousand years or so. It felt unhurried, as though it didn’t care how long the next thousand years took, it would be looking on with interest. It was about as mellow as a saxophone solo in a late night jazz club.

Which reminded us that before we knew of Dinant we hadn’t given much thought as to how the Saxophone came into being. The town relentlessly celebrates the fact that it is Adolphe Sax’s birthplace. It is impossible to avoid the giant polyester Saxophones on the bridge and elsewhere in the town, the glass one in the fountain outside the town hall, the brass sculptures and portraits, the restaurants with “sax” cleverly incorporated into their names, and even the little museum which quietly explains that actually he may have left for Paris at an early age. It seems that Dinant may well be to Sax, what Allora is to Mary Poppins. (There’s something to look up on a rainy day!)

Feeling a tad over-saxed this morning we took off on our bicycles into the valley beyond to visit what shows on the map as a big rock, and then we visited another. They were indeed big rocks, one with holes in it sufficiently large to build a road through it, one with a crack that served the same purpose. Size may not matter but there’s a starkness to them and a scale that when viewed up close we found not at all relaxing. Big rocks we have discovered are about as mellow as a Vuvuzela quartet at a football match.

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Fading memories

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Had he still been among us, and for some inexplicable reason stumbled upon these pages he may quite rightly have observed that this blog is simply here to remember things for us, thereby saving us that particular bother and allowing us to get on with the next bit of our lives without distraction, our adventures safely tucked away for a time when we may well need to recall them.